1. Field
Apparatuses and methods consistent with the disclosure provided herein relate to an electronic apparatus and encryption method thereof, and more particularly to an electronic apparatus performing data encryption and encryption method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Under the cloud computing environment, it is possible to store and use data in several distributed storage units. Developing technologies utilizing the cloud computing environment is necessary and essential.
Electronic apparatuses connected to the network store and transmit a large volume of information, and apply current security transmission technologies such as secure sockets layers (SSL), Internet protocol security protocol (IPSec), or encryption methods to provide security. As the network has a wider scope in the cloud computing environment, electronic apparatuses storing data and transmission paths are also becoming more connected to the cloud environment. Further, user information generated, stored, and transmitted by the electronic apparatuses may be transmitted through channels affecting security in the cloud computing environment. Thus, data encryption technologies providing data privacy in various channels should basically be considered in terms of data transmitted and stored in the cloud environment and in the cloud storage units.
While conventional encryption technology provides data privacy, it lacks user convenience in terms of managing and searching data.
For instance, by utilizing scan to server, scan to e-mail, or scan to personal computer (PC) in a multiple function device, a user can process personal information through the scanning of a multi-function peripheral, and store the processed data at an S-server, an e-mail, or a PC. For the information privacy, the current technology utilizes user authentication with the identification (ID), the password (PW), and user access control to limit the access right to the storage units with the more secure channels, such as IPSec or SSL.
This technology has problems in that a user has to repeatedly set more secure channels such as IPSec or SSL using the same method to find or search information and move the data to another storage unit.
Thus, it may be particularly inefficient and difficult under a cloud computing environment which requires frequent communication, such as moving freely between storage units, i.e., storing data in a more secure storage unit, setting secure channels in every session and implementing access control to storage units.
A searchable query encryption method, first suggested by Song et al. (2000), has been increasingly studied, about searching queries such as equality, range, subset and inner product in encrypted data. However, in addition to the obstacles barring actual implementation of the technology to practical use, this method also has problems in managing and utilizing symmetric encryption keys such as a secret key or an asymmetric decryption key such as a private key.